


The Years are Measured in Inches

by theLiterator



Series: so they tremble [1]
Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Always a Different Sex, Gen, Genderswap, Introspection, always-a-girl!Tony
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-16
Updated: 2013-02-16
Packaged: 2017-11-29 11:19:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,126
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/686369
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theLiterator/pseuds/theLiterator
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tony grows her hair out after Afghanistan.</p>
<p>A prequel to So They Tremble.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Years are Measured in Inches

Tony grows her hair out after Afghanistan. It’s counter-intuitive; she has more reasons than ever to keep it cropped short and safe, but she lets it grow.

Every inch of length is a wall between her and the smoldering ruins of a cave.

Every inch of length is another second she has to keep her head submerged in the shower to get it clean. (She comes up gasping and disoriented, but the walls are clean white tile and she is not chained to a car battery by cheap, leaded solder and fraying copper wire.)

It rolls down her shoulders in loose waves, and Pepper despairs of it, dropping whole packages of elastics and plastic claw clips around the workshop so that maybe, just maybe, she’ll pull it back before she whips out the acetylene torch this time.

It’s cut in layers, not by a stylist’s hand, but her own, because of this.

Burning hair smells nothing at all like moldy, tepid water and battery acid corroding her life away.

It takes her longer than she thinks is fair to perfect the art of braiding it, until one day a chance encounter with a Latina night custodian leads to her running two two-strand braids behind her shoulders.

People Magazine puts her in their celebrities on the street section four issues in a row, mocking her for this. By the time the fifth issue goes to print, half of America’s businesswomen are wearing their hair the same way.

She meets Captain America for the first time wearing a suit of gold-titanium alloy and a shower of sparks. Her hair is braided behind her shoulders, but of course he can’t see that.

She meets Captain America for the second time wearing SHIELD’s paramilitary tac gear, her hair loose around her face, and he tells her she is useless.

She smiles at him, and tells him his outfit is stupid and he doesn’t have a Ph.D. in any related field, so he’s the useless one. Would he like a blueberry?

He pivots sharply on his heel and retreats, and she runs a hand through her long, tangling hair, stares at the screens as they track the systems’ progress, and thinks about how many, many inches it’s been since Afghanistan.

Her fingers tap out a rhythm on her arc reactor as she tries to convince Bruce he can be a hero too, (but she can taste his fear, and he doesn’t have a way to measure out the distance from it, like she does.)

She kisses his cheek, which surprises him more than the shock from her little improvised Hulk-prod did.

***

Steve Rogers is disquieted by the culture. The technology he takes to like a duck to swimming, (and she supposes it makes sense. It isn’t as if there weren’t computers yet, in WWII, or television sets, or telephones, or cars. If he’d come from the 1840s, that would justify the big fucking deal SHIELD wants to make out of his quiet acquiescence, but as it stands, she figures as long as he doesn’t start trying to use her labs to build a time machine, they’re golden. Also, he’s an amazing touch typist; too bad Pep won’t let her ask him to be her secretary.) but the people and the food he can’t handle very well at all.

She takes to keeping Mexican bottled coke in little glass bottles in the fridge, and Ivory soap in the bathrooms. She does hours of research on preservatives and fabrics and chemistry, and then she implements her findings in every way possible. It’s no different than the indoor bonsai garden she’d contracted for Bruce’s suite, or the beautiful little tasers she’s designed for Natasha’s repertoire. Clint won’t let her even glance at his bow and quiver, but when JARVIS quietly alerted her that he’d gotten stuck in the ducts, she’d hired contractors to adjust the sizes on the intake and output vents for the HVAC system. (then she’d added biometric safeguards, because really.)

But then, as she’s flipping through People, because her alerts for her name had pinged on it again and she had a spare moment (not really, actually, but she plans to tell Pepper it’s research for PR purposes.) she sees the spread and has an aha! moment to rival some of her best. She’s on the phone to her very favorite tailor before she has the words to express her aha, because sometimes you have to roll with the moments.

“I want you do give me a 40s inspired business wardrobe,” she tells Alonso when he picks up.

His silence is very decidedly non-judgmental.

“Will that work for us?” she adds as an afterthought. She knows nothing about 40s fashion except that it was practical and used less fabric than 20s fashion or 50s fashion due to rationing. Or maybe she doesn’t know that, has simply inferred that from available data.

“Exceedingly well. You’ll want to do something about your hair,” he adds.

She freezes, a screwdriver clattering from her fingers due to centripetal acceleration. She blinks images of curves and tangential force from her eyes and says, “I’m not cutting it.”

“Hire a stylist to follow you around then,” he suggests. “No more pigtails, in any case. You are not a little girl, Antonia.”

“You’re right,” she says, softly. “I’m an adult.”

“He will like you in pin curls, I think,” Alonso retorts before hanging up.

She slips the phone into her thigh pocket and starts to braid her hair behind her shoulders without thinking. She snatches her hands back forward once she realizes it and reaches for one of the many clips in her workshop to twist it up. It takes two tries, and when she finally gets it, she’s scowling at nothing.

This is the sort of mood that calls for finicky work, soldering filaments to wafers and cleaning up the excess.

She loses herself for a few hours, before carrying on with her very busy day.

She wears her first new dress to a board meeting. Not one of the men present can take his eyes off her the entire time.

She’s actually used to that.

The second time, she wears it to the park and eats a hot dog with Bruce, laughing and curled into a park bench with her legs crossed.

Us Weekly beats People to the punch.

By February, the 40s have made a massive revival. Steve still treats her like she’s an incapable idiot on the best days, like she’s a wilting hothouse flower on the worst.

She perseveres.

At least he likes Iron Man, she thinks, as she tightens the drawstring on her latest ex-boyfriend’s sweats and braids her hair back behind her shoulders.

It ends just below her ribcage, now.


End file.
